This invention relates to the fields of computing devices and sensors. More particularly, methods and apparatus are provided for determining a person's absolute compass orientation from a portable electronic device.
Methods and devices for determining a person's location are known. Some solutions employ GPS (Global Positioning System) technology, while others use RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), UWB (Ultra-Wideband) or other components.
Although these schemes may reveal a person's absolute location, they are unable to discover his or her orientation—e.g., which direction he or she is facing. Such information may be very useful to determine the person's interest (e.g., which product or products he is examining) or observation (e.g., whether she is likely to have seen something).
In addition, systems for determining a person's location generally require a number of cooperating components that are not co-located. Specifically, most systems rely upon triangulation of one or more electronic signals, whether from a GPS satellite, an RFID emitter, a WiFi access point, a UWB node or other device, and multiple transmitters and/or receivers are required to correlate and disambiguate the signals and the information conveyed by the signals.